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Hans Hogerzeil

Hans V. Hogerzeil, MD, PhD, FRCP Edin

Hans V. Hogerzeil (Netherlands, 1951) is Professor of Global Health at Groningen University (Netherlands). He qualified as a medical doctor from Leiden University in the Netherlands and received a PhD in public health in 1984. For five years he was a mission doctor in India and Ghana and in 1985 he joined the WHO Action Programme of Essential Drugs, first in the Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office in Alexandria, and later in WHO's headquarters in Geneva. As a staff member of WHO he has advised more than forty developing countries, especially in Africa and Asia, on the development of their national medicines policy, essential drugs list and essential medicines programme. In more recent years he advised the governments of South Africa, India and China on their medicine policies. As Secretary of the WHO Expert Committee on the Selection and Use of Essential Medicines he initiated the 2002 changes in procedures for updating the Model List of Essential Medicines, which stronger emphasis on evidence-based selections. He established the web-based WHO Essential Medicines Library and was one of the editors of the WHO Model Formulary in 2006. Under his direction of the department of Policy and Standards (2004-2008) the WHO/UN Prequalification Programme was established.

From 2008 to 2011 he was Director for Essential Medicines and Pharmaceutical Policies, being responsible for all WHO's global policies, nomenclature, norms and standards on medicines, the prequalification programme, as well as all technical country support to Member States in the field of medicines (currently support programmes in over 100 countries, covering access to essential medicines, quality, and rational use). He was also the Chair of the Interagency Pharmaceutical Coordination Group which coordinates the pharmaceutical policies of WHO, all major UN agencies, the Global Fund, the World Bank and UNITAID.

Dr Hogerzeil is the editor of several WHO books on essential medicines policies, the quality use of medicines, medicines in emergency situations and essential medicines for reproductive health. He has published over 50 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals and teaches every year at international courses all over the world. In 1996 he was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh and in 1998 he received an honorary Doctorate of Science from the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland. He is married with four children.

His recent interests include essential medicines for reproductive health, access to essential medicines as part of the fulfillment of the right to health, the development of a patent pool for combination therapies for the second-line treatment of HIV/AIDS, and regional medicine regulatory harmonization in Africa.